An erudite and unsettling but convincing argument that the new Russia is a dictatorship “approved by the majority as long as...
Relief at the end of the Cold War lasted barely a decade before observers began wondering if it was returning, this time under a pugnacious, quasi-Stalin: Vladimir Putin.
This is not true, writes distinguished historian Laqueur (After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent, 2012, etc.), but no one should take comfort. In this astute, timely analysis of recent Russian politics and ideology, the author, former longtime director of the Institute of Contemporary History in London, emphasizes that the dissolution of the Soviet Union produced an unreasonable optimism about the chance for democracy. “Most Russians have come to believe that democracy is what happened to their country between 1990 and 2000,” writes the author, “and they do not want any more of it.” When Putin came to power in 2000, he seemed like a tough leader determined to stabilize a nation mired in chaos and economic collapse. No one denies his spectacular success, but the resulting “Putinism”—a mixture of chauvinism, social conservatism, state capitalism, government domination of the media, and the pervasive sense of a nation surrounded by enemies—brings to mind the Soviet Union. In fact, Russia’s leaders believe that “the victory of the Reds in the civil war was a disaster,” and they hold a low opinion of Lenin. Although admitting that Stalin committed too many unjustifiable actions during his time in power, they admire him because he made his nation strong. Minus the mass murder or any pretense of internationalism, that is Putin’s goal as well.
An erudite and unsettling but convincing argument that the new Russia is a dictatorship “approved by the majority as long as the going is good,” and if Putin were to vanish today, his successor would make few changes.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06475-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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